iSub iPhone Client - Version 2.0 Released

[einsteinx2]

i really love your app. the best one i've used when it comes not only to apps for subsonic. i used to use simplify media and then orb before i discovered subsonic and i think both the "userfriendlyness" and how it looks is way ahead of the other ones out there. i was just thinking about some small changes you could make that is not a must and maybe i'm alone in this but here goes...

1. when you first open the app or when you choose albums or songs at the top in 2.1 the reload bar shows. i think it would look better if it just showed from the search bar and not the reload bar, and if you scroll then the reload bar shows.

2. the colour you use on the reload bars (light blue) it would look better i think if you used that colour aswell instead of the grey one on everyother track or artist and so on. make it more unified and look cleaner if you know what i mean.

3. keep the font size the same in all the choices. it's the same in all of them except playlist that is smaller. not a big deal but i think will make the look more unified.

4. i get the buffer screen in this version, but for version 2.2 when you impliment the new buffering code maybe that screen will be unnecessary?

again, keep up the great work and thanks for an amazing app!

Thanks for the suggestions. I agree with you on point's 1-3. Once I've gotten the hard stuff out of the way I'm definitely going to be looking to polish the UI anywhere I can and those are some good places to start. This local song caching that I'm working on now is difficult to implement because I also have resume and song skipping features, without those it would be much easier, so it's taking a bit more work than I had anticipated. Also, trying to integrate an offline browsing mode and full browse and download functionality without cluttering the interface too much is also turning out to be more difficult than I anticipated. Once that stuff is done I'll be able to devote all of my attention to cleaning up the UI and fixing all the lingering bugs (one problem with Subsonic having so many features and supporting so many different setups and having only myself to do all the testing for iSub), along with natively supporting the iPad (the next major overhaul). I'm hoping to have all this done in the next 4 weeks, and if I can keep a steady supply of those 5 hour energies into my system it should be possible.

And you are correct about the buffer screen. That's just an interim screen until the caching is implemented. Then it will probably display information about the progress of the currently caching track and total/free cache space.

Glad you're enjoying the app so far! It's definitely a work in progress, but I think come 2-3 months from now it will be an extremely robust and polished application that will rival the best streaming media apps out there. I have to give out my sincerest appreciation to Sindre for the work he's done coding his wonderful app. Without Subsonic, none of this would be possible!

[thomasbruce]

cool, looking forward to see how things turn out. i'm using you app everyday so once again thanks and of course thanks to sindre and his amazing work on subsonic

[wraithdu]

I don't have any problem with a lag while seeking, that is to be expected. I've got a quad core x64 machine as well, so it's pretty quick.

I can't explain the problem either. Perhaps it's something to do with my setup:

Win7 Ultimate x64
Subsonic 3.9 (WAR) running on
Tomcat 6.0.26

I successfully tested seeking a while back, but it was probably when I was still running the Jetty version, and I can't remember if I ever tried a transcoded file. Incidentally, it doesn't matter if I'm seeking a transcoded flac, or just a downsampled mp3, I have the same seeking problem in each.

Ya know... I recently changed my lame transcoding settings to use VBR:

lame -S -V 2

Perhaps that's the problem?

[einsteinx2]

I don't have any problem with a lag while seeking, that is to be expected. I've got a quad core x64 machine as well, so it's pretty quick.

I can't explain the problem either. Perhaps it's something to do with my setup:

Win7 Ultimate x64
Subsonic 3.9 (WAR) running on
Tomcat 6.0.26

I successfully tested seeking a while back, but it was probably when I was still running the Jetty version, and I can't remember if I ever tried a transcoded file. Incidentally, it doesn't matter if I'm seeking a transcoded flac, or just a downsampled mp3, I have the same seeking problem in each.

Ya know... I recently changed my lame transcoding settings to use VBR:

lame -S -V 2

Perhaps that's the problem?

I haven't tried setting my transcoding settings to use vbr, but almost my entire collection is in LAME V0 and I've had no problem skipping through tracks. However, it could very well be that because your vbr file is being created on the fly, it is missing some information about the bitrate that iSub needs to pick the position to skip to.

Since I can't reproduce this with my Subsonic install, would you mind making me a temp account on yours for a few days to test this and see if I can figure out the problem?

[wraithdu]

Sure, PM'ing you now...

[eleazar]

I absolutely love your app einsteinx2. I picked it up when it was $2.99 but unfortunately it wasn't very usable because my collection is massive and it would take 3-7minutes to cache the song/album lists. Anyways, with the 2.2 update, everything is working beautifully. I left you a glowing review stating the same thing.

I just wanted to pop in and offer my thanks for being so active and adding so many features so quickly.

I'll be switching to Android (to get the Droid Incredible) in about a week, so I won't be using your app anymore, but I'll be sure to recommend it to any iPhone users I come in contact with.

[bob1029]

Looking good... I might stop using the ipod application altogether now. The 384 on the buffer screen indicates 384kbytes right?

[einsteinx2]

I absolutely love your app einsteinx2. I picked it up when it was $2.99 but unfortunately it wasn't very usable because my collection is massive and it would take 3-7minutes to cache the song/album lists. Anyways, with the 2.2 update, everything is working beautifully. I left you a glowing review stating the same thing.

I just wanted to pop in and offer my thanks for being so active and adding so many features so quickly.

I'll be switching to Android (to get the Droid Incredible) in about a week, so I won't be using your app anymore, but I'll be sure to recommend it to any iPhone users I come in contact with.

Thanks! Glad you're getting to enjoy it for at least a week

Looking good... I might stop using the ipod application altogether now. The 384 on the buffer screen indicates 384kbytes right?

Roughly. It's actually 384 "buffers", basically blocks of audio data. They are just a bit over 1KB each but may not be completely full with audio data.

Soooo, long story short, ya it's about 384kbytes

[adhesiv]

Hey Einstein, one issue i experience fairly often is a complete loss in stream. I'll be running fine for about 5-6 songs at 95%+ buffer and then almost consistently my buffer falls out, never recovers, and the stream won't pick back up again until i manually choose another song or click the forward button.

Any ideas why this is happening?

[einsteinx2]

Hey Einstein, one issue i experience fairly often is a complete loss in stream. I'll be running fine for about 5-6 songs at 95%+ buffer and then almost consistently my buffer falls out, never recovers, and the stream won't pick back up again until i manually choose another song or click the forward button.

Any ideas why this is happening?

From what I've been able to tell it has to do with problems with 3G service coverage. To completely resolve the issue, I have switched the code to locally cache songs. So it will download the entire song as you play, rather than only downloading the next 20 seconds or so at a time. This should totally stop dropouts on all but the worst connections. It will be available in the next version, 2.2.

[Concept211]

For some reason the app appears to begin loading then all of a sudden just disappears and goes back to my springboard. Is there any way to view an error log or something to see when/why it's crashing? I'm running the 3.0 firmware on the original 2G iphone. It's unlocked and jailbroken if that makes any difference.

thanks!

[u2jrmw]

Crashes happen to me during song loading. Basically I can not use the app at all. Pretty disappointing. I do have a very large track collection (25,000), so that may just be more than the app can handle.

[dsnhdiv]

I have had a few crashes but not all the time, I am having buffer issues were the track starts and plays about 10 seconds then just skips to the next one. I just figure these will be ironed out in the next version. I used to be a huge simplify media user but I appreciate the work and open environment of subsonic so much more!

[einsteinx2]

For some reason the app appears to begin loading then all of a sudden just disappears and goes back to my springboard. Is there any way to view an error log or something to see when/why it's crashing? I'm running the 3.0 firmware on the original 2G iphone. It's unlocked and jailbroken if that makes any difference.

thanks!

You and one other person that has contacted me seem to have this problem, but I haven't been able to duplicate it on any of my test devices as it seems to be a very rare issue only impacting random devices. The other user is using a 2G iPod Touch, also jailbroken. I use iSub on my main phone which is a jailbroken 3G-S and have friends using it on their jailbroken devices, so I don't think the jailbreak itself is the culprit, but it could very well be something installed via Cydia that is causing some conflict. I'm working with that other user to iron this problem out, if you're interested in also trying out a test build to try and get to the bottom of this, please shoot me a PM. I'm confident I'll be able to have this sorted for the next version with just a little help from affected users, it's just difficult to figure out on my end because I can't duplicate it myself.

[einsteinx2]

Crashes happen to me during song loading. Basically I can not use the app at all. Pretty disappointing. I do have a very large track collection (25,000), so that may just be more than the app can handle.

Got over 26,500 tracks in my collection, so size shouldn't be the issue here. If it is crashing on track loading, that is usually caused by an issue with transcoding in Subsonic. iSub asks Subsonic to start streaming the track, and then Subsonic sends back data that iSub isn't expecting and it causes a hard crash. I've experienced this myself trying to play a FLAC song when I didn't have my transcoding settings set up properly. Are your tracks MP3, or are you transcoding from another format?